Mark Twain Disagrees with Comics Comics
by Jeet Heer
Thursday, July 8, 2010
By some cosmic fluke, the Mark Twain Foundation has just released a previously unpublished essay (written circa 1889 or 1890) by the great writer taking issue with an argument I made in a previous post. The full essay can be found here. An excerpt:
No one likes to be interviewed, and yet no one likes to say no; for interviewers are courteous and gentle-mannered, even when they come to destroy. I must not be understood to mean that they ever come consciously to destroy or are aware afterward that they have destroyed; no, I think their attitude is more that of the cyclone, which comes with the gracious purpose of cooling off a sweltering village, and is not aware, afterward, that it has done that village anything but a favor. The interviewer scatters you all over creation, but he does not conceive that you can look upon that as a disadvantage. People who blame a cyclone, do it because they do not reflect that compact masses are not a cyclone’s idea of symmetry. People who find fault with the interviewer, do it because they do not reflect that he is but a cyclone, after all, though disguised in the image of God, like the rest of us; that he is not conscious of harm even when he is dusting a continent with your remains, but only thinks he is making things pleasant for you; and that therefore the just way to judge him is by his intentions, not his works.
The Interview was not a happy invention. It is perhaps the poorest of all ways of getting at what is in a man.
Labels: Mark Twain
That’s some great prose right there.
That just reinforces the point that a great interview requires reciprocation on both parties. If they’re not on the same page, or if the subject doesn’t have anything to say then it probably won’t amount to much.
The last sentence is quite the interesting point. What is the best way of getting to the heart of the matter? Is it interviews, critical essays or just reading the author’s actual works? I’d say that interviews are the least likely method because it’s such a challenge to get the subject to lower their guard.
One advantage comics has had is that the industry has always been small. It has been relatively easy to get creators to sit down and open up. Try doing the same in other media where the artist might reach a level of fame that would disincline him from doing an interview. At Mark Twain’s level, one could understand why he would be so wary.
But as the PBS site points out, he’s writing this during the rise of yellow journalism, so I read it as a reaction against a kind of scandalmongering/infotainment type of interview—today’s entertainment journalism. How many in-depth celebrity interviews have you read? Even many author interviews are more promotional than incisive. They’re meant to be quick snippets rather than long, insightful explorations of a writer/artist’s craft. You’d have to devote pages to a single subject, as the Paris Review does for instance, or as Joe did in his interview with Bryan Lee O’Malley. And a good interview comes from spending some time with the subject, in addition to doing your research. I don’t agree that it’s “the poorest of all ways.” I think readers can get a lot of out a thorough interview; it’s just that it must be taken together with other literature—artist writings, the works themselves, criticism, and your own opinion.
Amazing